Ellen DeGeneres Gifts A House To Fight Metro Detroit Blight

HIGHLAND PARK, MI — Talk show host Ellen DeGeneres, known for bestowing big gifts to struggling people, is helping a Highland Park woman build Avalon Village, an eco-friendly development in one of the most blighted areas of the city, which is located just outside of Detroit. A 12-foot-by-40-foot prefab house valued at about $100,000, donated by DeGeneres and the company that manufactures it, Cocoon9, arrived Tuesday morning, much to the delight of Shamayim “Mama Shu” Harris.

Mama Shu knew the home was coming. She appeared on DeGeneres’ talk show in September and talked about her plans to help revitalize Highland Park, where her 2-year-old son, Jakobi Ra, died in 2007 in a traffic accident as he crossed a poorly lit street. Since then, Harris has found that galvanizing her neighbors to build Avalon Village has had a healing effect.

The donated house will be used as a welcome center for Avalon Village, which Harris envisions as a community with sustainable infrastructure. For example, when heavy rains flood roads and concrete parking lots, a system will capture rainwater on roofs and in retention ponds to feed year-round, sub-terrain greenhouses and provide water to flush toilets in a community where many can’t afford their monthly water bills.

Multiple other innovative projects are planned, including The Goddess Marketplace, an empowerment building that addresses Highland Park’s soaring unemployment rate, which stood at 23 percent — nearly four times the national average — when it was last measured in 2014. The marketplace will be an economic engine for Avalon Village, providing a place for women to produce and sell wares. The city’s first solar-powered street light has been installed in the area. A “homework house” under development will give kids access to a computer lab, library, laundry room and kitchen. So are sports fields. More plans are detailed on a Kickstarter campaign.

DeGeneres was beyond impressed by the plans, announcing on her Sept. 14, 2016, show that Cocoon9, a company she co-owns with Christopher Burch, would donate the home.

Mama Shu’s plans for Highland Park know no bounds. Many of the projects are centered on children like Jakobi to ensure they have a safe and happy place to grow up. So far, 11 vacant lots, of which there are many in the suburb once regarded as a desirable place to live, have been purchased. Dilapidated houses have been torn down and lots landscaped.

“Every block is going to be back beautiful again,” Harris said.

How did she get the money?

“Girl, I begged my friends,” Harris told DeGeneres in September. “We sold food, I used my own check money. We did everything.”

And the courage to start a project that many said was unattainable: Where did that come from? DeGeneres wondered.

It’s simple, Harris said: “We deserve to have a quality living environment.”

Mamu Shu is not an urban planner, just a grieving mother who turned her heartache into action. “It saved me,” she told DeGeneres.

And it may save Highland Park, too, making the struggling city an example for others who say urban blight is a life sentence.

“For me, this means that, wow, people are really watching and want to see positive things happening within the Detroit area because it’s been so long with the acceptance of white flight and black blight,” Avalon Village volunteer Jamila Taylor, 43, of Detroit, told the Detroit Free Press. “Our nation wants to embrace the good that’s happening.

“The house, that’s progress,” she said. “It’s not just for one person. It’s for all of us. … I could not imagine having the strength after the loss of a child to say, ‘I’m going to … build a village.’ But she’s doing it.”

Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images News/Getty Images